What can the democrats learn by the loss of Cockley

[Xellos2099]

Do people even understand what single payer health care really mean? It basically mean: government will handle all aspect of healthcare but also at the same time, dictate what medicine you can have. If let say for example you are in need of a special medicine to relive pain and the government doesn't approve of it, you are FUCK. Single player mean it would be ILLEGAL to pay fort medic care in US with your own money for things that government doesn't pay for, where is the freedom in that?

People claim that insurance across the state line and tort reform doesn't help with healthcare cost, but does it hurt to test it out to see if there is improvement? I mean, there has to be a reason "why" almost no democrat want to discuss tort reform? I don't see why not... I mean, doctors pays for malpractice insurance and from what I hear, it can get to like 100k a year and where do you think the cost got pass to? Having no limit on damage on primitive damage on malpractice court is one of the reason why many doctors use defensive medicine since people in US is so sue happy, specially the black's population.

These two thing I suggest might not mean much individually, but it should be a right step in the direction of lowering healthcare cost, right?

 

[Xellos2099]

double post

 

[cubby1223]

People claim that insurance across the state line and tort reform doesn't help with healthcare cost, but does it hurt to test it out to see if there is improvement? I mean, there has to be a reason "why" almost no democrat want to discuss tort reform? I don't see why not...

Texas passed tort reform under then Governor George W. Bush. Ever since Bush began running for President in 2000, trial lawyers have dumped untold mountains of cash into the campaign chests of Democrats, specifically to prevent Bush from accomplishing any kind form tort reform on a national level.

Quick google link
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/032300wh-gop-bush.html


The "progressive" view that all Democrats are perfect saints, and all Republicans are nothing but special-interest whores, is, well...

I suppose it all means for the topic of this thread, that the Democrats better learn that their ability to lie to the public is fading fast.

 

[dmcowen674]

What can the democrats learn by the loss of Cockley

The equivalent danger for the Republican's is to assume the American people are happy with republican lock step grid lock.

Because the continuation of such policies are likely to see a complete collapse of our existing health care system.

After all, what the R's stand for now is the continuation of GWB&co policies that so collapsed in 2008.

Do we want to bring those GWB type policies back and totally melt down our economy again?

If the dems fail in 11/2010, this country will be in a heap of problems with continual gridlock.

United we stand, divided and we are sure to fail.

And anyone who thinks our current grid lock is a good thing is crazy.

Our failure to adapt to change is a good part of the problems.

Make the country 100% Republicans

It deserves to go down in flames.

 

[Red Dawn]

Bingo.

Did you catch when Olbermann and Maddow were waxing eloquent on how the Dems have the obligation to postpone Brown's swearing in until health care reform is passed and Chris Matthews pointed out that when Kennedy was elected in a special election he was sworn in the next day? Talk about a turd in the punch bowl moment . . .

Nah I don't watch the crap that's Cable news. Those two are on the same caliber as the assholes on Fox.

 

[Bateluer]

The GOP has no real health care reform bill of their own, so all they did today is paint a target on their back for the 2012 election.

Ironic, the republican's proposals for reform would have been MUCH more beneficial than Pelosi's and Reid's bill. You must get all your news from a single source?

 

[sportage]

No lesson to learn. She was just a bad person to run. We have the same-o in iOwa running against Grassley. No real challenge here, or in Mass. You gota be serious if you want to play the game and win.

As for healthcare, I thought it was slap happy funny watching Fox news (God... forgive me), after when they had a group of supposed democrats that mostly voted for Brown in protest and sending a msg against healthcare reform.
So this one guy in their group says just that, “no to reform”, he voted for Brown.
Then he adds "I just recently lost my healthcare". WHAT!!!

This jerk thinks the system “as is”, is really going to help support him on his healthcare costs NOW??? Does this retard realize, now that he has no healthcare, that if he or his family gets seriously sick, that they will not only rack up thousands in healthcare bills overnight, but also and no doubt the eventual loss of their home?
Are these people really THAT stupid?
The healthcare system is all $$$, profits and stock holders. They, exactly like wall street, care not about what happens to the American economy. They just want their $$$, one way or another. If that leads to your family living on the street, so be it!

At least the democrats are "trying" to reform the system, as poorly as they are going about it.
This Brown guy is not going to help the average middle class worker one ounce.

BTW, our healthcare system as it is, is growing so huge, an ever growing major financial part of the economy, that you know what is coming... Just like Wall Street, at some point they will demand a gov tax payer bailout costing YOU billions. That is, after their insured “healthcare well” has ran dry. After they have raised costs so high, NO ONE can afford healthcare, no matter if your employer offers it or not. Be prepared for the next tax payer bailout... the insurance industry. Too massive to let fail, too massive to be controlled.

 

[umbrella39]

You still think healthcare is the number one issue facing this nation right now, don't you?

That's actually your number one problem.

What is the number one problem then? and how is the cost of health care/the millions of uninsured not part of/separate from that problem?

 

[Strk]

The health care bill is a joke. It doesn't even offer anything to help control costs.

 

[brencat]

NOT AGAIN

Tell me what part of this you don't understand:

Insurance across state lines with no state regulation means that my state cannot protect my rights.


And the thought of the government setting a cap on damages won in a free nation's court by free people is disgusting. The question is why it's not disgusting to the right.

What rights does your state protect exactly that is better than anywhere else?

Secondly, I said cap damages at a level that has bipartisan support. That probably means $1mm +/-. I'm trying to eliminate the ambulance chasers and the class action spivs that take 40% of the winnings and distribute the balance in useless $5 checks to each of 30,000 lawsuit plaintiffs. In those cases it's the lawyers who win.

My wife's OBGYN pays $175k in liability insurance and has never had a judgement against him in 25+ years of practice. The cost has tripled in 15 years. Does that sound reasonable? I think not.

 

[Red Dawn]

No lesson to learn. She was just a bad person to run. We have the same-o in iOwa running against Grassley. No real challenge here, or in Mass. You gota be serious if you want to play the game and win.

As for healthcare, I thought it was slap happy funny watching Fox news (God... forgive me), after when they had a group of supposed democrats that mostly voted for Brown in protest and sending a msg against healthcare reform.
So this one guy in their group says just that, “no to reform”, he voted for Brown.
Then he adds "I just recently lost my healthcare". WHAT!!!

This jerk thinks the system “as is”, is really going to help support him on his healthcare costs NOW??? Does this retard realize, now that he has no healthcare, that if he or his family gets seriously sick, that they will not only rack up thousands in healthcare bills overnight, but also and no doubt the eventual loss of their home?
Are these people really THAT stupid?
The healthcare system is all $$$, profits and stock holders. They, exactly like wall street, care not about what happens to the American economy. They just want their $$$, one way or another. If that leads to your family living on the street, so be it!

At least the democrats are "trying" to reform the system, as poorly as they are going about it.
This Brown guy is not going to help the average middle class worker one ounce.

BTW, our healthcare system as it is, is growing so huge, an ever growing major financial part of the economy, that you know what is coming... Just like Wall Street, at some point they will demand a gov tax payer bailout costing YOU billions. That is, after their insured “healthcare well” has ran dry. After they have raised costs so high, NO ONE can afford healthcare, no matter if your employer offers it or not. Be prepared for the next tax payer bailout... the insurance industry. Too massive to let fail, too massive to be controlled.

Well the people have spoken, fuck the uninsured.

 

[Linflas]

Well the people have spoken, fuck the uninsured.

Or it could be they said you don't have to fuck the 80% that have health insurance they are happy with to cover those that do not have coverage.

 

[StageLeft]

Well Dean's take-home message is to stop trying to be bipartisan and centrist (really, he said this on Maddow's show, I just saw it on her web-site), so apparently the take-home lesson for him is to be more divisive.

 

[ebaycj]

Do people even understand what single payer health care really mean? It basically mean: government will handle all aspect of healthcare but also at the same time, dictate what medicine you can have. If let say for example you are in need of a special medicine to relive pain and the government doesn't approve of it, you are FUCK. Single player mean it would be ILLEGAL to pay fort medic care in US with your own money for things that government doesn't pay for, where is the freedom in that?

People claim that insurance across the state line and tort reform doesn't help with healthcare cost, but does it hurt to test it out to see if there is improvement? I mean, there has to be a reason "why" almost no democrat want to discuss tort reform? I don't see why not... I mean, doctors pays for malpractice insurance and from what I hear, it can get to like 100k a year and where do you think the cost got pass to? Having no limit on damage on primitive damage on malpractice court is one of the reason why many doctors use defensive medicine since people in US is so sue happy, specially the black's population.

These two thing I suggest might not mean much individually, but it should be a right step in the direction of lowering healthcare cost, right?

Why do you ASSUME that in a single payer system, that the rights of the individual to pay with his own dollars for (usually experimental) treatment that is not covered by the single-payer-insurance would go away?

Also, single-payer "malpractice insurance" for doctors follows logically from implementing a single-payer health insurance system. Why would you ASSUME that increasing the amount of doctors in the malpractice insurance pool would not lower the cost of malpractice insurance?

 

[ebaycj]

Ironic, the republican's proposals for reform would have been MUCH more beneficial than Pelosi's and Reid's bill. You must get all your news from a single source?

How do you know how "beneficial" any reforms will be before enacting them?

You don't, because nobody really does.

 

[Hacp]

The idea of single payer health care does not seem bad. Rationing care is a good way to control costs. However, knowing the government, they'll hire a bunch of union members, give them high salaries and huge pensions and tax working people to death.

 

[StageLeft]

BTW, our healthcare system as it is, is growing so huge, an ever growing major financial part of the economy, that you know what is coming...

Yes, but please understand this is the case for every Western nation. They are all seeing health care costs rise and being more of their GDP every year, just like the US. The only way for anybody to hold it where it is as a percentage of GDP now is to simply start limiting it, it's that simple.

I honestly don't think that healthcare making up a huge portion of the economy is a bad thing. Health concerns generally ring at the top of people's importance list--at least once they get ill they do. Funny how wishing for that new car suddenly becomes completely meaningless and worthless when you are consulting with a doc about the open heart surgery you're about to get. Much of the economy is based on luxuries and extras, from tvs to over-size houses and cars and vacations and restaurants. And much of the huge % of GDP designated to healthcare is representative of the fact that it is a growing industry with more capabilities than it has had in the past and that people realize it's an important thing in their life.

 

[wwswimming]

to Dump Pelosi.

and no, this is not some crusade against beautiful women legislators.

 

[GTKeeper]

I work on Wall St and was a finance major. Textbooks tell me interest rates should be low to stimulate growth. Common sense tells me my retired father will not be able to live off the interest income he's getting without compromising principal if rates stay low like this for another 2 years.

We can have low rates but not near zero rates. Hedge funds used to borrow money from Japan and invest it elsewhere. Now they're borrowing money from the U.S. and investing it globally. How does that help us? The act of borrowing and carry trades to lever up and speculate in the capital markets is causing a misallocation of capital...which will lead once again...shocker...to asset bubbles (the current stock market waaaaay ahead of growth prospects), and an eventual meltdown.

Keynsian economics is a failure in my book. We will pay the piper big someday soon with all the personal and sovereign debt we have. And the next market meltdown is probably less than a year away. All we're doing is delaying the inevitable...face the music now and get it over with.

And I haven't even talked about what will happen when the Fed will need a bailout when the market moves against the trillions in mortgages it's carrying on its books. You do realize the Fed is the marginal buyer in this space currently, yes? Very easy from a trading perspective to tip a market when you know one player holds a sizeable position.

I don't think Keynsian economics is a failure. What you will notice in his theories that yes you do stimulate by issuing debt in times of trouble, but when times are good you need to PAY DOWN THAT DEBT and save CASH for the next rainy day so you can issue debt again. Its more about even keel than just spending yourself into oblivion. A lot of people don't get that and its easy to bash the system because we never do step 2 so its always looking like 'Keynsian economics are evil bla bla bla'

 

[ebaycj]

What rights does your state protect exactly that is better than anywhere else?

Secondly, I said cap damages at a level that has bipartisan support. That probably means $1mm +/-. I'm trying to eliminate the ambulance chasers and the class action spivs that take 40% of the winnings and distribute the balance in useless $5 checks to each of 30,000 lawsuit plaintiffs. In those cases it's the lawyers who win.

My wife's OBGYN pays $175k in liability insurance and has never had a judgement against him in 25+ years of practice. The cost has tripled in 15 years. Does that sound reasonable? I think not.

How is this a "medical malpractice" problem?

See, tort reform can screw the little guy. That's why most dems don't like it. They stand up for the little guy. For example, If I have a doctor that cuts off the wrong leg by accident (leaving me with no working legs, and the rest of my life to deal with that), and I can only get $1M from his insurance to cover all my expenses (at my current quality-of-living) for the rest of my life (since I am now unable to work), that is complete and total B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. I have to retro-fit my house for wheelchair access, buy a wheelchair van, deal with any complications being in a wheelchair can cause, deal with any discrimination I may get by being in a wheelchair, deal with reduced job opportunities / reduced future earning ability / reduced quality of life, FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE from being in a wheelchair due completely to this doctor's incompetence. I need all of these costs to be covered by his insurance to get justice, and $1M ain't gonna cut it. This is why dems don't support republican "tort reform".

You'd probably get a TON of support from both sides of the aisle, if you passed/proposed a law limiting the maximum payout to the lawyer in ANY class-action (of sufficient size, maybe with a "class" of more than 100 plaintiffs and/or a payout of over $25M) case to 5%-10% of the total amount awarded.

This has the benefit of not screwing the plaintiffs (who are the ones who got screwed by the defendants, and should have no statutory limit on damages), while at the same time, making it more difficult for lawyers to collect tens- or hundreds-of-millions from a huge class action suit. Case in point: DRAM anti-trust price-fixing lawsuit. I got a check for something like $3. So did everyone else in the whole country, practically. The lawyers got $100M+.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

Hopefully they learned that they need to actually work with Republicans instead of working behind closed doors and trying to bully their way through the legislative process. Just a thought.

 

[Craig234]

to Dump Pelosi.

and no, this is not some crusade against beautiful women legislators.

Pelosi is fine. You want them all to be corporate whores.

 

[shiner]

Well Dean's take-home message is to stop trying to be bipartisan and centrist (really, he said this on Maddow's show, I just saw it on her web-site), so apparently the take-home lesson for him is to be more divisive.

So he's staying on deck playing Nearer My God To Thee until the ship finishes sinking?

Noble, but stupid.

 

[craftech]

The media drives the narrative. They intentionally did no exit polling in Mass so there would be no record to contradict their lies (for the five of us in the country that would look it up). Democrats make up around 33% of the Mass electorate. The rest are "ignependents".

The media narrative:

1. Since 2006 (when the Democrats supposedly took control) it takes 60 votes to "pass" legislation in the Senate. If the Democrats don't get 60 votes they have to move to the "center". Republicans don't have to move on anything.

2. Bi-partisanship (just watch any Washington press corp news conference and listen to the right wing questions and accusations from the so-called liberal media) is the sole responsibility of the Democrats. If the Republicans won't budge on anything it's not their fault. It's always the fault of the Democrats who need to move to the "center". Any Democrats who side with Republicans are called "moderate" or "centrist" Democrats by the media. That includes the endless obstruction of Obama's appointees too. Less than half have been confirmed. And from 2006 to 2008 when Bush threatened to veto legislation (if it ever got that far) the Democrats had to "move to the middle" in order for Bush not to veto it. It was not Bush's fault he threatened to veto it from when it was first introduced in the House. It was the fault of the Democrats who need to "move to the center".

3. For the first time in history, the losers in an election deserve as much air time as the winners. Example Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, John McCain. Plus the endless stream of Republicans on the Sunday brain washing shows and during the week at prime time (proof: Nexis database search). The media narrative for ignorant Americans: "The Republicans seem to be doing a better job of getting their message out than the Democrats".

4. The Supreme Court case that was heard (Citizens United v FEC) is on the minds of all politicians in Washington. It was always known that they would rule in favor of Citizens United and against the FEC overturing yet another lower court ruling and trashing stare decisis thereby displaying once again that the activist judges are Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Scalia. Due last week , but the Supreme court has delayed the writing of their decisions to at least this week. No one reported on this monumental case in network and cable news. The case will trash existing restrictions on Corporate funding of campaigns forever. All future elections will be completely funded by corporations thereby ensuring that Republicans have a permanent majority. Many Democrats have moved to the right in anticipation of this decision to attempt to hold onto their jobs. Yet none of this is newsworthy.

Americans deserve what they get because they are lazy and would rather use their remote control from their armchair to find the "truth". With the corporate media all that is apparently necessary for Americans to "learn" is repetition. Ivan Pavlov would have been proud.

John

 

[Budmantom]

They learned to stop shoving unpopular legislation down our throats.

Wrong Democrats don't learn, they just blame.